The instant Esther felt herself really loved, she met her fate as women will when the shock is once over.  Hazard had wanted her to love him, had pursued and caught her.  Now when she turned to him and answered his call, she seemed to take possession of him and lift him up.  By the time he left her house this Saturday evening, he felt that he had found a soul stronger and warmer than his own, and was already a little afraid of it.  Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman’s heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.

Esther herself was more astonished than Hazard at the force of this feeling which swept her away.  She suddenly found herself passionately attached to a man, whom, down to the last moment, she had thought she could never marry, and now could no more imagine life without him than she could conceive of loving any one else.  For the moment she thought that his profession was nothing to her; she could believe whatever he believed and do whatever he did; and if her love, backed by her will, were not strong enough to make his life her own, she cared little what became of her, and could look with indifference on life itself.  So far as she was concerned she thought herself ready to worship Woden or Thor, if he did.

The next morning she could not let him preach without being near him, and she made Catherine go with her to St. John’s.  They took their seats, not in her own pew but in a corner, where no one should notice them under their veils.  The experiment was full of peril, though Esther did not know it.  This new excitement, coming so swiftly after a fortnight of exhaustion, threw her back into a state of extreme nervousness.  Of course the scene of Saturday evening was followed by a sleepless night, and when Sunday morning came, her very restlessness made her hope that she should find repose and calm within the walls of the church.  She went believing that she needed nothing so much as the quieting influence of the service, and she was not disappointed, for her sweetest associations were here, and as she glanced timidly up to the scaffolding where her romance had been acted, she felt at home and happy, in spite of the crowd of people who swarmed about her and separated her from the things she loved.  In the background stood the solemn and awful associations of the last few weeks, the mysteries and terrors of death, drawing her from thought of earthly things to visions of another world.  Full of these deep feelings, saturated with the elixir of love, Esther succumbed to the first notes of the church music.  Tears of peaceful delight stood in her eyes.  She glanced up towards her Cecilia on the distant wall, wondering at its childishness.  How deep a meaning she could give it now, and how religious a feeling!

She was not conscious of rustling silks or waving feathers; she hardly saw the swarm of fashionable people about her; it seemed to her that her old life had vanished as though she were dead; her soul might have taken shelter in the body of some gray linnet for all that she thought or cared about the vanities of human society.  She wanted only to be loved and to love, without being thought of, or noticed; to nestle in her own corner, and let the world go by.

Unluckily the world would not go by.  This world which she wanted to keep at arms’ length, was at church once for all, and meant to stay there; it felt itself at home, and she, with her exclusive griefs and joys, was the stranger.  So long as the music lasted, all was sympathetic enough, but when Mr. Hazard read the service, he seemed far-off and strange.  He belonged not to her but to the world; a thousand people had rights of property in him, soul and body, and called their claim religion.  What had she to do with it?  Parts of the service jarred on her ear.  She began to take a bitter pleasure in thinking that she had nothing, not even religious ideas, in common with these people who came between her and her lover.  Her fatigue steadily worked on her nerves.  By the time the creed was read, she could not honestly feel that she believed a word of it, or could force herself to say that she ever should believe it.

With fading self-confidence she listened to the sermon.  It was beautiful, simple, full of feeling and even of passion, but she felt that it was made for her, and she shrank before the thousand people who were thus let into the secret chambers of her heart.  It treated of death and its mystery, covering ignorance with a veil of religious hope, and ending with an invocation of infinite love so intense in feeling and expression that, beautiful as it was, Esther forgot its beauties in the fear that the next word would reveal her to the world.  This sort of publicity was new to her, and threw her back on herself until religion was forgotten in the alarm.  She became more jealous than ever.  What business had these strangers with her love?  Why should she share it with them?  When the service was over, she hurried Catherine away so quickly that they were both at home before the church was fairly empty.

This was the end of her short happiness.  She knew that through the church door lay the only road to her duty and peace of mind.  To see that the first happy impression had lasted barely half an hour, and instead of bringing peace, had brought irritation, was cause enough to alarm the most courageous young woman who ever rushed into the maelstrom of matrimony.

When they had reached home, she flung herself into a chair and covered her face with her hands.

“Catherine!” said she solemnly; “what am I to do?  I don’t like church.”

“You would like your’s amazingly,” said Catherine, “if you had ever been to mine.”

“Was your’s worse?”

“If Mrs. Murray hadn’t improved my manners so much, I should smile.  Was mine worse?  I wish you and Mr. Hazard would try it for a change.  Mrs. Dyer would like to see you both undergoing discipline.  Never joke about serious matters!  You had better hold your tongue and be glad to live in a place where your friends let your soul alone.”

“But I can’t sit still and hear myself turned into a show!  I can’t share him with all Fifth Avenue.  I want no one else to have him.  To see him there devoting himself and me to a stupid crowd of people, who have as much right to him as I have, drives religion out of my head.”

Catherine treated this weakness with high contempt.

“I might as well be jealous,” said she, “of the people who look at Mr. Wharton’s pictures, or read Petrarch’s sonnets in my sweet translation.  Did you ever hear that Laura found fault with Petrarch, or, if she did, that any one believed she was in earnest?”

“It is not the same thing,” said Esther.  “He believes in his church more than he does in me.  If I can’t believe in it, he will have to give me up.”

“He, give you up!” said Catherine.  “The poor saint!  You know he is silly about you.”

“He must give me up, if I am jealous of his congregation, and won’t believe what he preaches,” replied Esther mournfully.

“Why should you care what he preaches?” asked Catherine; “you never heard your aunt troubling her head about what Mr. Murray says when he goes to court.”

“She is not forced to go to court with him,” said Esther; “nor to be a mother to all the old women in the court-room; nor to say that she believes ­believes ­believes ­when in her heart she doesn’t believe a word.”

Hazard appeared in the middle of this dispute, and Esther, troubled as she was, could not bear to distress him.  She still meant to accept every thing and force herself to follow him in silence; she would go where he led, and never once raise her eyes to look for the horizon.  As she said to herself quite seriously, though with a want of reverence that augured ill; “I will go down on my knees and help him, though he turn Bonze and burn incense to Buddha in my very studio!” His presence always soothed her.  His gayety and affection never failed to revive her spirits and confidence.

“Wasn’t it a good sermon?” said he to Catherine as he came in, with his boyish laugh of triumph.  “Give me a little praise!  I never got a word of encouragement from you in my life.”

“I should as soon think of encouraging a whole herd of Texas cattle,” answered Catherine.  “What good can my praise do you?”

“You child of nature, don’t you know that children of nature like you always grow wild and need no cultivation, but that we artificial flowers can’t live without it?”

“I don’t know how to cultivate,” answered Catherine; “it is Esther you are thinking about.”

Having announced this self-evident fact, Catherine walked off and left him to quiet Esther’s alarms as he could.  As she went she heard him turn to Esther and repeat his prayer that she should be gentle with him and give his sermon a word of praise.

“How can I stop to think whether it is good or not,” said Esther, “when I hear you telling all our secrets to our whole visiting list?  I could think of nothing but myself, and how I could get away.”

“And whose secrets can I tell if not our own?” asked Hazard triumphant.

While he was with her Esther was peaceful and happy, but no sooner had he gone than her terrors began again.

“He will find me out, Catherine, and it will break my heart,” she said.  “I never knew I had a jealous temper.  I am horribly narrow-minded.  I’m not fit for him, and I knew it when he asked me.  He will hate me when he finds what a wife he has got.”

Catherine, who positively declined to recognize Mr. Hazard’s superiority of mind over Esther, took this with unshaken fortitude.  “If you can stand it, I guess he can,” she remarked curtly.  “Where do you expect the poor man to get a wife, if all of us say we are not fit for him?”

This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long ­the matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it more serious still.  Try which way she would there was no escape from her anxiety.  Hazard, who had foreseen some trouble from her old associations with loose religious opinion, had taken it for granted, with his usual self-confidence, that from the moment she came within the reach of his faith and took a place by his side she would find no difficulties that he could not easily overcome.  “Love is the great magnet of life, and Religion,” he said “is Love.”  Nothing could be simpler than his plan, as he explained to her.  She had but to trust herself to him and all was sure to go well.  So long as he was with her and could gently thrust aside every idea but that of their own happiness, all went as well as he promised; but unluckily for his plan, Esther had all her life been used to act for herself and to order others rather than take orders of any sort.  The more confidently Hazard told her to leave every thing to him, the less it occurred to her to do so.  She could no more allow him to come into her life and take charge of her thoughts than to go down into her kitchen and take charge of her cook.  He might reason with her by the hour, and quite convince her that nothing was of the least consequence provided it were left entirely in his hands, but the moment he was out of sight she forgot that he was to be the keeper of her conscience, and, without a thought of her dependence, she resumed the charge of her own affairs.

Her first idea was to learn something of theology, in the hope of settling her foolish and ignorant doubts as to her fitness for her new position.  No sooner did the thought occur to her than she set to work, like a young divinity student, to fit herself for her new calling.  Her father’s library contained a number of theological books, but these were of a kind that suited Mr. Dudley’s way of thinking rather than that of the early fathers.  As Esther knew nothing at all about the subject, except what she had gathered from listening to conversation, one book seemed to her as good as another, provided it dealt with the matter that interested her; but when Hazard came in and found her seated on a sofa, with a pile of these works about her, his hair rose on end, and he was forced gently to take them away under the promise of bringing her others of a more correct kind.  These in their turn seemed to her not quite clear, and she asked for others still.  He found himself, without warning, on the brink of a theological abyss.  Unwilling to worry him; eager to accept whatever he told her he believed, but in despair at each failure to understand what it was, Esther became more and more uncomfortable and terrified.

“What would you do, Catherine, if you were in my place?” she asked.

“Let it alone!” said Catherine.  “You didn’t ask him to marry you.  If he wants you, it’s his business to suit himself to you.”

“But I must go to his church,” said Esther, “and sit at his communion.”

“How many people at his church could tell you what they believe?” asked Catherine.  “Your religion is just as good as theirs as long as you don’t know what it is.”

“One learns theology fast when one is engaged to be married,” said Esther with a repentant face.

She was already sorry that she had tried to learn any thing about the subject, for she already knew too much, and yet a terrible fascination impelled her to read on about the nature of the trinity and the authority of tradition, until she lost patience with her own stupidity and burned to know what other people had to say on such matters.  It occurred to her that she should like to have a quiet talk with George Strong.

Meanwhile Mrs. Murray, panic-stricken at learning the engagement, had sent at once for George.  The messenger reached him on Sunday evening, a few hours after Esther told her aunt.  Mystified by the urgent tone of Mrs. Murray’s note, Strong came up at once, and found his uncle and aunt alone, after dinner, in their parlor, where Mr. Murray was quietly smoking a cigar, while his wife was holding a book in her hand and looking hard into the fire.

“George!” said his aunt solemnly; “do you know the mischief you and your friends have done?”

Strong stared.  “You don’t mean to tell me that Catherine has run off with Wharton?” said he.  “She can’t have done it, for I left Wharton not fifteen minutes ago at the club.”

“No, not that! thank Heaven!  Though if she hadn’t more head than ever he had, that French wife of his might have given her more unhappiness than he is worth.  No, it’s not that!  Catherine is the only sensible creature in the family.”

Strong glared into the fire for a moment with a troubled air, and then looked at his aunt again.  “No!” said he.  “Esther hasn’t joined the church.  It can’t be!”

“Yes!” said Mrs. Murray grimly.

“Caramba!” growled Strong, with a profusion of Spanish gutturals.  Then after a moment’s reflection, he added:  “Poor child!  Why should I care?”

“You irritate me more than your uncle does,” broke out Mrs. Murray, at last losing patience.  “Do you think I should be so distressed if Esther had only joined the church?  I should like nothing better.  What has happened is very different.  She is engaged to Mr. Hazard.”

Strong broke into a laugh, and Mr. Murray, with a quiet chuckle of humor, took his cigar out of his mouth to say: 

“Let me explain this little matter to you, George!  What troubles your aunt is not so much that Esther has joined the church as that she fears the church has joined Esther.”

“The church has struck it rich this time;” remarked Strong without a sign of his first alarm.  “Now we’ll see what they’ll make of her.”

“The matter is too serious for joking;” said Mrs. Murray.  “Either Esther will be unhappy for life, or Mr. Hazard will leave his church, or they will both be miserable whatever they do.  I think you are bound to prevent it, since you are the one most to blame for getting them into it.”

“I don’t want to prevent it;” replied Strong.  “It’s a case of survival for the fittest.  If Hazard can manage to convert Esther, let him do it.  If not, let her take him in charge and convert him if she can.  I’ll not interfere.”

“That is just the remark I had the honor to make to your aunt as you came in,” said Mr. Murray.  “Yesterday I wanted to stop it.  To-day I want to leave it alone.  They are both of them old enough to manage their own case.  It has risen now to the dignity of a great cause, and I will be the devil’s advocate.”

“You are both of you intolerable,” said Mrs. Murray, impatiently.  “You talk about the happiness of Esther’s life as though it were a game of poker.  Tell me, George! what kind of a man is Mr. Hazard at heart?”

“Hazard is a priest at heart,” replied Strong.  “He has the qualities and faults of his class.  I understand how this thing happened.  He sees nothing good in the world that he does not instantly covet for the glory of God and the church, and just a bit for his own pleasure.  He saw Esther; she struck him as something out of his line, for he is used to young women who work altar-cloths; he found that Wharton and I liked her; he thought that such material was too good for heathen like us; so he fell in love with her himself and means to turn her into a candlestick of the church.  I don’t mind.  Let him try!  He has done what he liked with us all his life.  I have worked like a dog for him and his church because he was my friend.  Now he will see whether he has met his match.  I double you up all round on Esther.”

“You men are simply brutal!” said his aunt.  “Esther will be an unhappy woman all her life, whether she marries him or not, and you sit there and will not raise a finger to help her.”

“Let him convert her, I say;” repeated Strong.  “What is your objection to that, aunt Sarah?”

“My objection is that the whole family is only a drove of mules,” said Mrs. Murray.  “Poor Mr. Hazard does not know what he is undertaking.”

“Is Esther very much in love?” asked Strong.

“You know her well enough to know that she would never have accepted him if she were not;” replied Mrs. Murray.  “He has hunted her down when she was unhappy, and he is going to make her more unhappy still.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Strong, seriously.  “The struggle is going to tear both their poor little hearts out; but what can we do about it?  None of us are to blame.”

“Ah, George!” exclaimed his aunt.  “You are the one most to blame.  You should have married Esther yourself, and you had not wit enough to see that while you went dancing round the world, as though such women were plenty as your old fossil toads, the only woman you will ever meet who could have made you happy, was slipping through your fingers, and you hadn’t the strength to hold her.”

“I own it, aunt Sarah!” said George, and this time he spoke seriously enough to satisfy her.  “If I could have fallen in love with Esther and she with me, I believe it would have been better for both of us than that she should marry a high-church parson and I go on digging bones; but some things are too obvious.  You can’t get a spark without some break in your conductor.  I was ready enough to fall in love with Esther, but one can’t do that kind of thing in cold blood.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Murray with a sigh.  “You have lost her now, and Mr. Hazard will lose her too.  You and he and all your friends are a sort of clever children.  We are always expecting you to do something worth doing, and it never comes.  You are a sort of water-color, worsted-work, bric-a-brac, washed-out geniuses, just big enough and strong enough to want to do something and never carry it through.  I am heartily tired of the whole lot of you, and now I must set to work and get these two girls out of your hands.”

“Do you mean to break up this engagement?” asked Strong, who was used to his aunt’s criticisms and never answered them.

“The engagement will break itself up,” replied his aunt.  “It will have to be kept private for a few weeks on account of her father’s death and her mourning, and you will see that it never will be announced.  If I can, I shall certainly do all in my power to break it up.”

“You will?” said Strong.  “Well!  I mean to do just the contrary.  If Esther wants Hazard she shall have him, if I can help her.  Why not?  Hazard is a good fellow, and will make her a good husband.  I have no fault to find with him except that he poaches outside his preserves.  He has poached this time to some purpose, but if the parish can stand it, I can.”

“The parish cannot stand it,” said Mrs. Murray.  “They are saying very ugly things already about Esther.”

“Then it will not hurt my feelings to see Hazard snub his congregation,” replied Strong angrily.

The family conclave ended here, and all parties henceforward fixed their eyes intently on the drama.  Mrs. Murray waited with a woman’s instinct for her moment to come.  Strong tried to counteract her influence by bungling efforts to make the lovers’ path smooth.  Catherine was a sort of cushion against which all the billiard balls of the game knocked themselves in succession, leaving her cool and elastic temper undisturbed.  Three more days passed without throwing much new light on the disputed question whether the engagement could last, except that Esther seemed clearly more anxious and restless.  Mr. Hazard was with her several hours every day and watched over her with extreme vigilance.  Mrs. Murray took her to drive every afternoon and not a glance of Esther’s eyes escaped scrutiny.  Strong stopped once or twice at the house but had no chance to interfere until on Thursday morning, his aunt told him that Esther was rapidly getting into a state of mind that must soon bring on a crisis.

“She cannot possibly make it do,” said Mrs. Murray.  “She is worrying herself to death already.  Mr. Hazard ought to see that she can’t marry him.”

“She will marry him,” answered Strong coolly.  “Three women out of four think they can’t marry a man at first, but when they come to parting with him, they learn better.”

“He is passably selfish, your Mr. Hazard.  If he thought a little more of his parish, he would not want to put over them a woman like Esther who has not a quality suited to the place.”

“Her qualities are excellent,” contradicted Strong.  “Once in harness she will be kind and gentle, a little tender-mouthed perhaps, and apt to shy at first, but thorough-bred.  He is quite right to take her if he can get her, and what does his parish expect to do about it?”

“The first thing they will do about it will be to make Esther miserable.  They have begun to gossip already.  A young man, even though he is a clergyman, can’t be seen always in company with a pretty woman, without exciting remark.  Only yesterday I was asked point-blank whether my niece was engaged to Mr. Hazard.”

“What did you say?”

“I told a lie of course, all the meaner because it was an equivocation.  I said that Mr. Hazard had not honored me with any communication on the subject.  I score up this first falsehood to his account.”

“If you lie no better than that, Aunt Sarah, Hazard’s conscience won’t trouble him much.  When is the engagement to be out?”

“Very soon, at this rate.  I thought that Esther, in common decency, could not announce it for a week or two, but every one already suspects it, and she will have to make it public within another week if she means to do so at all.  Now that she is her own mistress and lives by herself, she can’t have men so much about the house as she might if her father were living.”

“Do you seriously think she will break it off?” asked Strong incredulously.

“I feel surer than ever,” answered his aunt.  “The criticism is going to be bitter, and the longer Esther waits, the more sharply people will talk.  I should not wonder if it ended by driving Mr. Hazard out of the parish.  He is not strong enough to shock them much.  Then Esther is growing more and more nervous every day because the more she tries to understand, the less she succeeds.  Yesterday, when I took her to drive, she was in tears about the atonement, and to-day I suppose she will have gone to bed with a sick headache on account of the Athanasian creed.”

“I must talk with her,” said Strong.  “I think I can make some of those things easier for her.”

“You?  I thought you laughed at them all.”

“So I do, but not because they can’t be understood.  The trouble is that I think I do understand them.  Mystery for mystery science beats religion hollow.  I can’t open my mouth in my lecture-room without repeating ten times as many unintelligible formulas as ever Hazard is forced to do in his church.  I can quiet her mind on that score.”

“You had better leave it alone, George!  Why should you meddle?  Let Mr. Hazard fight his own battles!”

George refused to take this wise advice.  He was a tender-hearted fellow and could not bear to see his friends suffer.  If Esther loved Hazard and wanted to marry him, she should do so though every dogma of the church stood in her way, and every old woman in the parish shrieked sacrilege.  Strong had no respect for the church and no wish to save it trouble, but he believed that Hazard was going blindly under Esther’s influence which would sooner or later end by drawing him away from his old forms of belief; and as this was entirely Hazard’s affair, if he chose to risk the danger, Strong chose to help him.

“Why not?” said Strong to himself.  “It is not a question of earning a living.  Both of them are well enough off.  If he can turn her into a light of his church, let him do it.  If she ends in dragging him out of the church, so much the better.  She can’t get a better husband, and he can’t find a better wife.  I mean to see this thing through.”

So George strolled round to Esther’s house after this interview with his aunt, thinking that he might be able to do good.  Being at home there, he went up-stairs unannounced, and finding no one in the library he climbed to the studio, where, on opening the door, he saw Catherine sitting before the fire, looking very much bored.  Poor Catherine found it hard to keep up with life in New York.  Fresh from the prairie, she had been first saturated with art, and was now plunged in a bottomless ocean of theology.  She was glad to see Strong who had in her eyes the advantage of being more practical than the rest of her friends.

“Catherine, how are your sheep?”

“I am glad you have come to look after them,” answered Catherine.  “I won’t be watch-dog much longer.  They are too troublesome.”

“What mischief are they doing now?”

“Every thing they can think of to worry me.  Esther won’t eat and can’t sleep, and Mr. Hazard won’t sleep and can’t eat.  She tries not to worry him, so she comes down on me with questions and books enough to frighten a professor.  Do tell me what to say!”

“Where are your questions?” asked Strong.

“This morning she wanted to know what I thought of apostolic succession.  She said she was reading some book by a Dr. Newman.  What is apostolic succession?”

“A curious disease, quite common among the poorer classes of Sandwich Islanders,” replied Strong.  “No one has ever found a cure for it.”

“Don’t laugh at us!  We do nothing but cry now, except when Mr. Hazard is here, and then we pretend to be happy.  When Esther cries, I cry too.  That makes her laugh.  It’s our only joke, and we used to have so many.”

“Don’t you think it rather a moist joke?” asked Strong.  “I take mine dry.”

“I can’t tell what she will think a joke,” replied Catherine.  “She asked me to-day what was my idea of heaven, and I said it was reading novels in church.  She seemed to think this a rich bonanza of a joke, and laughed herself into hysterics, but I was as serious as Mr. Wharton’s apostles.”

“You are never so funny as when you are serious.  Never be so any more!  Why don’t you get her to paint?”

“She won’t.  I’m rather glad of it, for if she did, I should have to sit for melancholy, or an angel, or something I’m not fitted for by education.”

“What shall we do about it?” asked Strong.  “Things can’t go on in this way.”

“I think the engagement had better come out,” said Catherine.  “The longer it is kept private, the more she will doubt whether she ought to marry a clergyman.  What do you think about marrying clergymen?  Wouldn’t it almost be better to marry a painter, or even a professor?”

“That would be playing it too low down,” replied Strong gravely.  “I would recommend you to look out for a swell.  What has become of your admirer, Mr. Van Dam?”

“Gone!” said Catherine sadly.  “Mr. Wharton and he went off together.  There is something about me that scares them all off the ranche.”

While they were thus improving each other’s minds, the door opened and Esther entered.  She was pale and her face had no longer the bright look which Wharton had thought so characteristic, but there was no other sign of trouble about her, and she welcomed her cousin as pleasantly as ever, so that he could hardly believe in the stories he had just heard of her distress.

“Good day, Cousin George,” she said.  “Thank you for coming to cheer up this poor girl.  She needs it.  Do take her out and amuse her.”

“Come out yourself, Esther.  You need it more than she does.”

“Aunt Sarah is coming at two o’clock to take me to drive,” said Esther.  “Catherine hates driving unless she drives herself.”

“I thought you hated it too.”

“Oh, I hate nothing now,” replied Esther, with a little of her old laugh.  “I am learning to like every thing.”

“Is that in the marriage service?” asked Strong.  “Do you have to begin so high up?  Couldn’t you start easy, and like a few things first, ­me for instance ­and let the rest wait?”

“No,” she said, “you are to come last.  Honestly, I am more afraid of you than of all the rest of the world.  If you knew what a bug-bear you are to me, you would be afraid of yourself.  Don’t make fun of me any more!  I know I am horribly funny, but you must take me in earnest.  Poor papa’s last words to me were:  ’Laugh and you’re safe!’ ­but if I laugh now, I’m lost.”

“This is the first time I ever met any one honest enough to acknowledge that marriage was so sad a thing.  Catherine, if I ask you to marry me, will you turn serious?”

“She will turn serious enough if she does it,” said Esther.  “You would stay with her a week, and then tell her that you were obliged to see a friend in Japan.  She would never see you again, but the newspapers would tell her that you had set out to look for bones in the Milky Way.”

“What you say sounds to me as though it had a grain of truth,” replied Strong.  “That reminds me that I got a letter telling me of a lot of new bones only yesterday, but I must leave them underground till the summer; if by that time I can do any thing for you in Oregon, let me know.”

“I want you very much to do something for me now,” said Esther.  “Will you try to be serious a moment for my sake?”

“I don’t know,” said Strong.  “You ask too much all at once.  Where are you coming out?”

“Will you answer me a question?  Say yes or no!”

“That depends on the question, Mistress Esther!  Old birds are not to be caught in old traps.  State your question, as we say in the lecture-room.”

“Is religion true?”

“I thought so!  Cousin Esther, I love you as much as I love any one in this cold world, but I can’t answer your question.  I can tell you all about the mound-builders or cave-men, so far as known, but I could not tell you the difference between the bones of a saint and those of a heathen.  Ask me something easier!  Ask me whether science is true!”

“Is science true?”

“No!”

“Then why do you believe in it?”

“I don’t believe in it.”

“Then why do you belong to it?”

“Because I want to help in making it truer.  Now, Esther, just take this matter coolly!  You are bothered, I suppose, by the idea that you can’t possibly believe in miracles and mysteries, and therefore can’t make a good wife for Hazard.  You might just as well make yourself unhappy by doubting whether you would make a good wife to me because you can’t believe the first axiom in Euclid.  There is no science which does not begin by requiring you to believe the incredible.”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

“I tell you the solemn truth that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.  The wife of my mathematical colleague, to my knowledge, never even stopped to ask whether it was true that a point had neither length, breadth nor thickness.”

Esther pondered a few moments, looking into the fire with a grave face.  Then she went on: 

“You are not talking honestly.  Why should I dare tell you that your old fossil bones are a humbug, when I would not for the world talk so to Mr. Hazard?  You don’t care whether geology is true or not.”

“Well, no, not much!” said Strong.  “I should care more if you told me that my best Japanese lacquer was modern.”

“Besides,” said Esther; “you have not answered my question.  I want to know what you think, and you won’t tell me.  Oh! don’t let me lose faith in you too!  I know your opinions.  You think the whole church a piece of superstition.  I’ve heard you say so, and I want you to tell me why.  You’re my cousin and I’ve a right to your help, but you won’t give it.”

“You are a desperate little tyrant,” said Strong laughing.  “You always were.  Do you remember how we fought when we were children because you would have your own way?  I used to give in then, but I am old now, and obstinate.”

“I know that you always ended by making me go your way,” replied Esther; “but that was because I never cared much where I went.  Now it is a matter of life and death.  I can’t move a step, or even let our engagement be announced until I feel sure that I shall not be a load on his neck.  Do you think I should hesitate to break it off, even if I broke my heart with it, if I thought it was going to bring trouble on him?”

Against this assault jesting was out of the question.  Strong was forced out of this line of defense and found himself in an awkward position.  Esther, not outwardly excited, but leaning her chin on her hand, and gazing into the fire with a look of set will, had the calmness of despair.  Strong was staggered and hesitated.

“The trouble with you is that you start wrong,” said he at length.  “You need what is called faith, and are trying to get it by reason.  It can’t be done.  Faith is a state of mind, like love or jealousy.  You can never reason yourself into it.”

“So Mr. Hazard says,” rejoined Esther.  “He tells me to wait and it will come, but he wants me to go on just as though I were certain of its coming.  I can’t wait.  If it does not come quickly, I must do something desperate.  Now tell me what you would do to get faith if the happiness of your whole life hung on it.”

Strong rose uneasily from his seat and stood up before the fire.  He began to think himself rash for venturing into this arena.  He had always believed his cousin to be stronger than Hazard, because Hazard was a clergyman, but he had not hitherto thought her stronger than himself, and he now looked at her carefully, wondering whether he could have managed her.  Never in his life had he felt so nearly in love with her as now, under the temptation to try whether she could be made to give up her will to his.  This feeling was the stronger because even in his own eyes his conduct so far seemed a little cowardly and ridiculous.  He pulled himself up sharply, and, seeing nothing else to be done, he took up the weapons of the church and asserted the tone of authority.

“Every one who marries,” he said, “goes it blind, more or less.  If you have faith enough in Hazard to believe in him, you have faith enough to accept his church.  Faith means submission.  Submit!”

“I want to submit,” cried Esther piteously, rising in her turn and speaking in accents of real distress and passion.  “Why can’t some of you make me?  For a few minutes at a time I think it done, and then I suddenly find myself more defiant than ever.  I want nothing of the church!  Why should it trouble me?  Why should I submit to it?  Why can’t it leave me alone?”

“What you want is the Roman church,” continued Strong mercilessly.  “They know how to deal with pride of will.  Millions of men and women have gone through the same struggle, and the church tells them to fix their eyes on a symbol of faith, and if their eyes wander, scourges them for it.”  As he talked, he took up the little carved ivory crucifix which stood on the mantel-piece among other bits of studio furniture, and holding it up before her, said:  “There!  How many people do you think, have come to this Christ of yours that has no meaning to you, and in their struggle with doubt, have pressed it against their hearts till it drew blood?  Ask it!”

“Is that all?” said Esther, taking the crucifix from his hand and looking curiously at it.  Then she silently put it against her heart and pressed it with more and more force, until Strong caught her hand in alarm and pulled it away.

“Come!” said he coolly, as he forced her to give up the crucifix; “my little bluff has failed.  I throw up the hand.  You must play it out with Hazard.”